Create Departments

With this feature you can distribute chat requests to departments or specific agents, depending on the subject or origin of the chat.

What a Department is, can be determined by yourself. This can be an actual existing department in your company like Customer Care Dept, or you can specify that all chats about a specific subject or product, or starting on a specific page of your website should go to one ‘department’ or a specific agent / specific group of agents.

SET UP OF DEPARTMENTSLogin to your FrescoChat control panel, click Departments in the menu, and create a new Department.

Enter the Department name, the email addresses for offline messages and for chat transcripts, the Alias that will be shown when transferring a chat, and choose which agents are designated to this Department.

Save your settings.

Repeat this for each Department you wish to create.

After you have created Departments, the website visitor will be presented a dropdown list on the chat box, so they can choose a Department when starting a chat. The visitor’s choice of Department determines to which agent or group of agents the chat request will be sent.

When Departments are enabled, a new property is added in your Trigger Rules, if any. For each Trigger Rule that is present, you’ll have to select which Department can reply chat requests originated by that Trigger Rule. If you don’t select any Department, FrescoChat will find ANY agent in ANY department.

USE AND BEHAVIOUR

Each Department in the dropdown shows if it’s online or offline. If the visitor selects an offline Department, the chatbox switches to offline mode, so they will be asked to send a message.

When the Department shows online but does not reply immediately, the visitor gets the usual messages such as “Please hold while we find an agent to assist you” etc, the messages that are already set in the FlexyTalk control panel > Chat Box > Translation/Localization.

A chat can be transferred to another Department, just like chats can be transferred from one agent to an other agent. When you transfer a chat session to a Department it starts a full chat request. If there’s no reply from the Department, the chat session goes back to the original agent.To transfer to a department, type the command !transfer [transfer alias] where [transfer alias] is configured on the Department’s settings. When you are using FlexyIM as your IM Client, the Departments that are online will be added to the Contacts list.

A Department can be hidden so it only receives chat requests from other departments who wish to transfer the chat. This is useful for managers or 2nd level support employees who don’t want to be available to answer all chat requests, but only for their co-workers who transfer a chat to them.

Drag and drop the Departments to reorder them. This will be the order of appearance of the Departments in the dropdown list for the visitors.

ADVANCED SETTINGS

It is possible to connect specific pages of your websites to Departments, so a chat started on that page will be routed to the designated Department automatically, without a dropdown list for the visitor to choose the Department.

To arrange this

Login to your FrescoChat control panel, click Departments in the menu, and create a new Department.

Enter the Department name, the email addresses for offline messages and for chat transcripts, the Alias that will be shown when transferring a chat, and choose which agents are designated to this Department.

Save your settings, and save the installation code into your website.

By this code, the chats of the page are routed to the designated Department (specific agents connected to that Department will receive the chat request), and the selection list of choices for the visitor will be hidden on that chat box.

Repeat this for each page you wish to designate to a specific Department.

ADVANCED

You won’t need to make your choices in the Trigger Rules. In this case the chat will go to the default Department which is determined by the installation code.

The Advanced settings will only be applied to the pages where you have installed them. On the other pages the default installation will be applied, meaning that the visitor will be presented a dropdown list of Departments so they can choose with which Department they want to chat.

The presence status of the chat bar (online or offline) will be the one of that Department. This is perfect for multiple websites pointing to different sets of agents.